Enhancing the mobility of collections and access to cultural heritage: immunity of cultural objects from seizure in Poland

This paper analyses, from the perspective of cultural policy considerations, the legal regime established by the recent Polish law on the immunity from seizure of cultural property on loan (2015). It deals with current trends of international museum exchange and explains the benefits and risks involved in cross-border loans of cultural material. This analysis is carried out by focusing on the actual practice and experiences of Polish museums, national and international regulations in force, and human rights considerations. The authors attempt to situate the Polish model for the protection of foreign cultural property on loan within the broader comparative context of the domestic legislation on museum exchange adopted in selected national jurisdictions. The article also offers a more general cultural policy discussion in the context of international museum exchanges of cultural material. Laws and policies facilitating such exchanges are weighed against other rights and interests encompassed in the protection of cultural heritage and the realisation of all human rights, including cultural rights.     

The China Museum Boom: soft power and cultural nationalism

ABSTRACT

We document major changes in museum supply in China between 1996 and 2015. These years have seen the opening of many small, low budget and locally managed museums; an increase in the average size and expenditure of all museums; and significant investments in a few large and centrally managed superstar museums. Chinese people have access to larger and better museums and pay lower admission fees. Regional inequalities in museum growth are smaller than inequalities in GDP growth. We relate these findings with the small literature on Chinese museums and specifically the notions of soft power and cultural nationalism.     

Heritage management at the local level: rhetoric and results in the case of Gaziantep,Turkey

Following international trends, Turkey has recently introduced decentralisation reforms to its highly centralised public administration system. These reforms have also applied to the cultural heritage sector, where innovative laws since 2004 have allowed local administrations and private actors to play new entrepreneurial roles. The Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality has been a pioneer in this process, promoting policies that promote cultural tourism as an engine of economic growth. Under its leadership, hundreds of historic buildings have been restored, nine new museums and heritage sites opened, and museum visitors increased tenfold. These positive results make Gaziantep an interesting case of successful decentralisation in heritage management. Despite these successes, however, the disconnection between rhetoric and results, and the fragmentation and ambiguity of responsibilities emerging from the decentralisation process raises serious questions about its sustainability and replicability.     

New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy

Museums are increasingly recognised as having a role to play within international relations, to facilitate cultural exchange, assert national identity and foster mutual understanding. Whilst international work is perceived to be politically motivated and diplomatically advantageous, it can be highly beneficial to cultural institutions. In this paper, ‘cultural diplomacy' is shown to be a strategy used by museums to enable organisational development and economic growth. This paper demonstrates how national museums adopted a political rhetoric and used strategic lobbying to formulate a new cultural policy, which expanded the scale and scope of their international work. By defining the parameters and principles of this policy, the institutions wield power, thus challenging the conventional perceptions of policy-making and contradicting commentators who accuse museums of political subservience. Throwing the notion of instrumentalism into disarray, this paper calls for a theoretical and conceptual rethinking, to revamp understanding and bring it in line with practice.     

Pioneer Living 1963 Style: Imaginations of Heritage in a Post‐war Canadian Suburb

This article connects the origins of a Canadian living history museum to the cultural and social developments of 1960s suburban Canada. Although there exists a strong literature on heritage and commemoration in Canada (and around the world), few scholars have looked explicitly at museums in that country. The literature on history museums elsewhere in the world is stronger. However, despite the strengths of this international literature, its focus has been on the use of museums in the present. An important aspect of the use of heritage, the historical contexts in which past museum visitors interpreted museum themes and displays, has not received much attention. This article argues that museum patrons of the 1960s, the decade in which many living history museums were founded, saw pioneer villages in the context of their own modernising lifestyles. However much Black Creek Pioneer Village might reflect anxiety about the direction of modernity, it also framed the past in ways that legitimated modern, suburban living.     

Is cultural democracy possible in a museum? Critical reflections on Indigenous engagement in the development of the exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum

Recent museological scholarship emphasises visitor participation and democratic access to cultural heritage as key to securing the ongoing relevance and future sustainability of museums. But do legacies of colonialist collecting practices and hierarchical conventions of representation in museums afford the possibility of genuine cultural democracy? This paper explores this question via detailed analysis of the Encounters exhibition, developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the British Museum and promoted as an unprecedented partnership between the institutions and Indigenous Australian communities. Drawing on an extensive and emerging literature on museums, community engagement, participation and democracy, in tandem with analysis of public critiques and Indigenous responses to the exhibition, the paper suggests that the extent of Indigenous agency within the collaboration fell short of the articulated goals of the project. It concludes that the concept of maximal participation and release of agency to communities of interest may be difficult to achieve within existing museum frameworks.     

Strategic management for visitor-oriented museums

Abstract: Strategic management is a familiar concept in for-profit organisations but is relatively new to museums. This paper presents and discusses a model of strategic management for visitor-oriented museums that aims to be more comprehensive than current approaches. It shows how museums can overcome the tension between the strategic demand to develop visitor-oriented museum services and the duties and social mandate of museums as public institutions that are defined by cultural policy—enabling access to cultural heritage, promoting broad cultural participation and providing informal education. Visitor-oriented strategic museum management is concerned with attracting a variety of visitors as well as the development of museum services that are appropriate to diverse museum audiences. The model presented here emphasises the comprehensive strategic management concept. Audience research and evaluation are shown to be valuable analytic and revision tools for strategic management in visitor-oriented museums.     

Slipping through the cracks: museums and social inclusion in Australian cultural policy development 2007–2010

This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010 in regard to its proposal to develop a new national cultural policy. Despite its stated commitment to the creation of opportunities for the re-articulation of existing publics and the formation of new ones, the newly elected federal government’s social inclusion and productivity policies did not, at any stage, seek to draw a positive or causal association between museums and social change. This was despite the museum sector’s numerous attempts to communicate its value in precisely these terms to government. It was also despite the precedents for this policy initiative that existed internationally, particularly in the UK. This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010, the international context within which these occurred, and the reactions generated by the museum and collections sector in response to the events.     

Evaluating the efficiency of museums using multiple outputs: evidence from a regional system of museums in Spain

Data Envelopment Analysis is used to evaluate museum efficiency. This approach enables us to create a relative efficiency measure for each museum, taking into account resources used by museums and the performance of their activities based on four well-defined tasks: conservation, research, communication and exhibition. Empirical analysis of data from a regional museum system in Spain is performed, considering a complex production function with several inputs and outputs. The main findings indicate that at least half the museums chosen operate efficiently, with the major cause for inefficiency being inadequate resource management. Only few museums evidenced significant inadequate scaling problems. Major progress, mainly due to improvements in internal efficiency, is evident in the museum system ratios when analysing productivity evolution using the Malmquist Index. By contrast, technological change has less impact, proving that cultural heritage is less receptive to new technologies as compared to other cultural industries.     

古物陈列所的兴衰及其历史地位述评

成立于1914年且存在了34年的古物陈列所长期被人们忽视并淡忘。它实际上是中国近代民主革命的光荣产物和反复辟斗争的重要成果,曾占据今日故宫博物院的半壁江山,被誉为“民国成立后最有价值之建设”。它是紫禁城向博物馆转变的第一篇章,是中国第一家国立博物馆、宫廷博物馆、艺术博物馆,开创了中国近代博物馆发展史的新纪元,在世界宫廷类博物馆中占有特殊地位,在中国近代政治、社会、文化史上也具有较深远的影响。     

New technologies in cultural institutions: theory,evidence and policy implications

Publicly-funded cultural institutions such as theatre companies, symphony orchestras, museums, libraries and so on are increasingly engaging with new technologies as a means of improving their operational efficiency and extending the range of ways in which they pursue their cultural missions. For example, opera companies are broadcasting performances by satellite to cinemas, and art museums are using the Internet to show virtual exhibitions. These developments have implications for funding authorities who need to update their policy approaches to encompass a range of new technological phenomena. This paper provides a framework for assessing technological innovation in cultural institutions, and discusses the ramifications of such a framework for cultural policy. The paper is illustrated using the results of a recent research project that evaluated the UK National Theatre’s NT Live experiment and the Tate Gallery’s use of a web-based exhibition as strategies to expand their audience reach.     

Democratization and museum policy in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article examines the two distinct historical policy paths taken by the South Korean government in the late twentieth century towards the democratization of museums. One was based on the creation of a museological public sphere as an extension of the political democratization movement of the 1980s. This demonstrated the potential to become a valuable component of the wider incipient national public sphere within which civic subjects could discuss their individual and collective historical memories. However, despite this potential, a museological public sphere failed to influence the general trajectory of national policy regarding the democratization of museums that had been in development since the early 1980s. This other policy path towards cultural democratization was triggered by the award of the Seoul Olympics in 1981. It was based on public participation and entitled the ‘cultural Olympics’. An important strategy of the cultural Olympics was the construction of a new institutional infrastructure to expand the public right to enjoy culture. This path facilitated an increasing entanglement with neoliberalism in 1990s. Finally, the 1997 IMF crisis furthered the association between a superficial idea of democratization through institutional expansion and the practices of neoliberalism, a trend which continues within South Korean museum policy today.     

Differences in the location of urban museums and their impact on urban areas

Traditionally, museums spaces have tended to be located in the central areas of cities, thereby reinforcing existing dynamics and limiting their potential impact on more peripheral areas. The present study examines the locations chosen for museums that have been opened in three European cities: Barcelona, Paris and Turin, between the years 2000 and 2013. It shows how the locating of museums and galleries has not been homogeneous and how each potential location has its strengths and weaknesses. This is particularly evident when we consider such factors as the environmental impact of museums and how they influence the commercial offer, image and attractiveness of their host city. This paper identifies and examines the different types of impact that museum location strategies have on urban areas.     

Managing performance in publicly funded museums in England: effects,resistances and revisions

Based on accounts gathered from nine museums and four professional/policy-making bodies, as well as policy analysis, this article maps out and assesses the effects of and ways of experiencing the new managerialist mode of governance within the publicly funded museums in England, focusing specifically on performance management in museums. It will be argued that the performance management regime has impacted local authority museums and national museums in distinct ways, creating different professional/organisational cultures as a result. These impacts pertain specifically to the professional and organisational autonomy of museums, with significant differences between small local authority museums and large national museums. This has serious implications for the way different types of museum relate to new managerialism and their mode of functioning. Some of the negative and unintended impacts of the performance management regime have induced a reappraisal – initially championed by the art world – and a move towards lightening up the new managerialist overload and pressure by introducing some elements of a peer-review model and accommodating in some form the qualitative singularity of museum experience. I will conclude by reflecting on the underpinning assumptions of new managerialism in museums against the backdrop of the project of museum professionalism and the singularity of its creative work.     

How Australian industry policy shaped cultural policy

Public policies that aim to facilitate cultural activities to serve effectively as industries are often regarded as a new phenomenon. This article argues that arts and cultural policies in Australia have reflected and complemented Commonwealth industry policy for most of their history. The significant change that has happened in the past twenty years is not so much a change to cultural policy, but rather a change in the notion of industries and their role in the national economy.     

Museums in revolution: changing national narratives in revolutionary Cuba between 1959 and 1990

This paper explores the function and role of museums in revolutionary Cuba between 1959 and 1990. Drawing on a variety of hitherto unexplored archives and interviews with bureaucrats of the Cuban heritage field, the paper argues that there is a close relation between museum production, the prevailing narration of nation, internal power struggles within the regime and the changing relation with the USSR. Museums were considered primary tools for historical production and politico-ideological socialisation. These were two fundamental issues for communist regimes, concerned with fixing cultural identity and affirming historical continuity. The paper focuses on the case of the Museum of the Revolution to argue that Cuban museums changed in conjunction with the increasing crypto-colonial relations of subordination to the USSR. In the first, humanist and Universalist phase, museums served to expand culture and spread a nationalist-revolutionary narrative of nation. The second period after 1975 witnessed the institutionalisation and Sovietisation of Cuban museums. This involved their transformation into a device to instil a nationwide homogeneous class-based Marxist–Leninist narrative adapted to Cuba from the Soviet model. This ideological closure of museum production contributed to the ideological and identity-building objectives of the regime.     

文化创意在博物馆中的运用

当今时代,随着我国经济的快速发展,生活水平不断提高,人们已不再满足于物质生活,提高文化生活需求的呼声已越来越高。作为文化产业的重要部门,博物馆已逐渐强调其开放性与多样性,增加观众的参与和互动。将其与文化创意相融合已成为文化部门当下最主要的任务和挑战,从而使得博物馆对我国的发展起到更加多元化的社会作用。     

Cultural franchising,imperialism and globalisation: What's new?

Abstract

The late 1997 opening of Frank Gehry's spectacular new Guggenheim in Bilbao has been widely promoted as the international museum event of the decade. In the context of other developments, it has also been seen as evidence of Guggenheim director Thomas Krens's ‘tireless efforts to build the world's first global museum brand’. In post‐colonial countries such as Australia we know that museums have often been inextricably involved in imperial and international as well as national cultural power struggles. In this paper the ‘global brand’ view of the Guggenheim is further examined in an attempt to clarify whether this is just more of the same, (old wine in a new bottle) or whether museums are entering a new era of globalisation—and if so what may be some of the consequences for professional museum practice.     

Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts,collaborations and constituencies

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain's local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain's domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.